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6 tips to improve your local SEO during 2018

Local search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about ranking well for searches relative to your business’s location.

If you offer products and services within your immediate vicinity, local SEO is an absolutely crucial marketing tactic, and one which will be particularly important during 2018 and beyond.

To get you started, here’s six brilliant tips to improve your local SEO this year:

1. Ensure you’re on Google My Business

Local SEO starts with a listing on Google My Business. If your company doesn’t have a presence on there already, you’re missing out.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to do, thanks to Google’s approachable setup routine. You can add everything from basic contact details to other info such as your opening hours and driving directions. Fill in as much as you can.

2. Post to your Google My Business account

Google recently added the ability to post updates to Google My Business accounts. Use this feature!

This means you can add mini blog posts about local offerings, upcoming events and deals you have on. Anything you post appears directly in the search results, enabling you to communicate with potential customers before they even land on your website.

3. Make sure you contact details are consistent

Once you’ve updated your contact details on Google My Business, make sure you have the exact same details across all channels.

That means your website, social media profiles and any directories your website might be listed on.

4. Implement schema markup

This is specific code that’s added behind the scenes on your website to help improve the way it looks in search results.

Google uses schema markup to recognise elements of your page and boost rankings (if you get it right, of course).

5. Get yourself on review sites

Although the thought of opening up your business to online critique from customers might fill you with dread, it’s a really important part of local SEO.

Depending on the industry within which you operate, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Foursquare offer review platforms that will help boost your rankings and give you a direct, fascinating insight into how your business is performing with customers.

6. Track you local search rankings

You can do all of this work for local SEO, but if you fail to track the results, you may as well not have bothered. After all, you could be getting it spectacularly right - or wrong - but you simply won’t know if you fail to look at the metrics!

You’ll undoubtedly need some assistance here (see the Wrapping Up section, below), but there’s a huge number of tools that help you track rankings for local searches.

You’ll be able to see trends relating to your rankings that will help you plan improvements to your local SEO strategy; spikes, opportunities and seasonal changes will suddenly become far clearer.

Wrapping up

Now, we know what you’re thinking; “how on earth do I have time to do this?”. And that’s a fair point. We should perhaps also point out that the above list is certainly non-exhaustive; there’s so much more you can do with local SEO.

Happily, we can help! Our in-house team of local SEO experts know how to fine tune your website and presence on Google to reach an impressive number of local customers. Get in touch to find out more!

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